Without a hint from you we're 100% in the "Do-What-I-Mean-Button"
ballpark which is not really helping with the "more thought" we might
need.

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I gathered from your mail, that you lost work because the save/export
distinction conditioned you into clicking the warning away. So, if you
don't want us to remove the warning, what are our options?

I will assume then that you haven't seen my earlier posts.
Here is some more detail. Ordinarily (since May when I started using
GIMP regularly-ish), I work in xcf and have no desire to export except
maybe once at the end. So, the default set up suits me most of the time.
There are two occasions where I used export rather than save. The first
was doing some levels and cropping on photos I had taken (scores, but
I've not processed them all yet). That went swimmingly, but the close
dialogs were annoying. The second was editing out a background on 70
odd (poorly-) chroma keyed photos (to be composited with a background by
someone else). I got through a small number before realising that I was
exporting to jpg, losing the transparent areas I'd added.
I lost some work because of the format I was using and the save/export
distinction didn't avoid that. Partly this was because I was habituated
to ignore the save as xcf warning. This is probably because the warning
appears no matter what the risk is (or, in the case of my cropping etc,
when there was no risk). The save warnings are false positives because
they are triggered by an irrelevant condition (ie close with export but
no save).

But jpg is a lossy format, so by exporting to jpg in the first case you
were loosing information - so a warning would still be appropriate. It's
just that in your first case you were happy with losing information,
while in the second case you weren't. How is GIMP to know what you're
happy to loose, and what you're not, at any given time?

The true trigger for a warning was that I was trying to
export an image to an inconsistent format (ie image has transparency but
format doesn't support it).
I am confident that I would have taken more notice of a warning (because
it would be out of the ordinary) if it: (a) didn't pop up the false
positives; but (b) did pop up an inconsistent format warning. Apparently
this functionality or something like it was in 2.6?